Rapture (7 page)

Nyx shut the door.

She stood a moment in the hall, trying to get her bearings. The radio was on downstairs, coming from the kitchen. The housekeeper’s rooms were out back, further down the lawn.

Nyx pulled her dagger. Not her preferred weapon, but it was quiet.

She padded down the stairs. Peered into the kitchen. The smaller bodyguard, Ayah, was there, feet on the table, listening to the radio as it wafted out misty images of some story from the Kitab. She was sipping a malty beverage. She was alone.

Nyx killed her quickly and cleanly. Ayah barely had time to turn her head before Nyx bared her throat. Ayah kicked back, spastically jerking her legs. Her chair clattered across the floor.

Nyx left the bodyguard in a pool of blood and went into the yard searching for Khanaya. She found her peering up toward Mercia’s room. Mercia had just closed the shutters.

At Nyx’s age, she had learned to move fast. Surprise and experience were her only advantages.

Khanaya turned as the knife came down. Caught the blade with her forearm. They grappled.

Khanaya fumbled for a pistol, too hasty, panicked. Nyx drove her knife into Khanaya’s eye and punched her in the throat to stifle the scream. She held Khanaya down until she bled out. Then Nyx gritted her teeth, hooked her arms under the body’s, and hauled the still-warm corpse back into the kitchen. She slopped it next to Ayah’s.

She sniffed at Ayah’s forgotten glass. The malty stuff gumming up the bottom was bad bootleg liquor. Nyx kicked the body’s leg away from the chair and sat down with the glass to wait. Sipped the liquor. Not bad. She listened to the thump-thump of explosions in the city center, and the low grumble of angry humanity. Blood congealed on the floor. Tiny blood mites began to appear along the edges of the room and scurry their way across the bare stone to the pooling blood.

That made two less people who knew where Anneke and Radeyah and the kids were. And a very simple message to Mercia. It should have been the most relaxed Nyx had been in years. She should have enjoyed killing this cleanly, and fucking a smarmy young diplomat. Instead, she found herself thinking of another woman back home, and a house full of kids, and Anneke’s crumbling back.

She finished her drink, and went out into the rumbling dawn to find Fatima.

A
hmed traded his face for a ticket out of Sahar. It seemed a fair enough deal at the time—the butchers told him it was a pretty face, and they had a fair number of mutilated veterans coming off the front who’d have use for it. As it was, he could use a new face himself. It was harder for bel dames to hunt down faceless men.

But when he woke on the butcher’s block, his vision a gray haze, a dull throbbing in his swollen mouth—like it had been stuffed with gauze— and he pressed his fingers to his engorged face and lips and tried to speak… he knew something was terribly wrong.

They had not taken his face.

They had taken his tongue.

A tall woman entered. Her hands were bloody crimson, her gaunt face a hallowed mask. In her fingers she held a strange creature—half worm, half beetle. It was flat and smooth, with savage hooks at one end.

“Open,” the woman said. He did not recognize her. Someone else had made the deal with him, and another woman had taken him here. She gripped his chin firmly in one hand, presented the worm-bug with the other. “Open,” she said, “Or did you never want to speak again?”

He opened. The worm fell into his mouth, wriggling and lashing. The morphine had taken the edge off, but he felt it when the worm jabbed itself into the stub of what was left of his tongue.

Ahmed retched.

“Don’t fight it,” the woman said. She slapped his shoulder. Left a long red smear of blood. “Just let it settle. In a week you won’t even notice it.”

He choked and drooled and finally, painfully, mumbled something like a curse. The worm waggled on the stub of his tongue. His words felt mangled, mushy. He gagged again.

“It’ll conform to you,” the woman said. “It’s a proper parasite. Just give it time.”

A tongue was a cheap organ, he knew. Not at all worth a trip out of Sahar. He bled all over the paperwork and collected his small sum and would have cursed the woman who’d taken him here, but the thought of speaking made his stomach churn. If he spent another day in Sahar, he would be dead. It didn’t matter much what he had to sell to get out.

So he slogged back into the fleshpots, and traded his right kidney for the remainder of what he needed for his train ticket. Still drooling and stumbling, he picked the first train headed to the interior. The woman at the counter spent twenty minutes reviewing his discharge tattoo and accompanying paperwork, then asked for an additional personal fee.

“I don’t understand that request,” he said, his words coming out garbled, sloppy, as if he were chewing on the worm with every word. He gagged again.

The ticket agent smiled, brazenly, the way all the women did who weren’t at the front. She told him men weren’t permitted on the interior without a special pass. “You won’t get past the filter, even with a face like that.”

He had no interest in being reminded of his fucking face.

“I’m not aware of that law,” he said, and spit blood and some yellowpink mucus on her counter.

“You are now,” she said. “One hundred notes, or you stay here at the front with the rest of the boys.” She leaned away from the ticket counter, still grinning. “I suppose you could walk across that desert. Plenty of other boys have, I hear. Mushtallah looks like some magician’s slab, bunch of pretty boys all standing around waiting to get put in jars.”

He had spent far too many nights on the sand already. His slick was going bad, starting to stink, and they had relieved his entire platoon of weapons before getting their discharge tattoos. Aside from the slick and his other kidney, he had little left of any value. If only they’d taken his face.

Ahmed took a deep breath. He started to recite the ninety-nine names of God, the way he had the time he saw his first squad torn apart by a hornet burst. It was the calm that kept you whole, when a hornet burst started biting. He had spent an hour in perfect stillness as his squad screamed and died around him, their faces and hands swelling and bursting, bloody foam at their mouths.

He thought, again, of his face. Tried to tame his new tongue. “Is there some other arrangement we can come to?”

It was easier to make the proper words this time, but it still felt grotesque, as if he were swallowing some live meal with every word.

The woman laughed. A big laugh, full and fearless, like the rest of her. “I have plenty of those offers, thanks.” She waved at the packed platform beyond the station, filled with boys and men, many of them still in their tattered standard-issue slicks, just as he was. “I work for currency. Blood, bugs, or notes. No exceptions.”

Ahmed considered that. “I can pay you a pint of blood and three locusts.”

“What kind of locusts?”

“Khairian.”

“Deal. Come here in the back and Samara will take care of you.”

He had no locusts, but it took him only a few minutes to call some. She was no magician. It wouldn’t be until she presented the locusts to a buyer that she would discover they were just some local variety. He had promised not to use his skill again after leaving the front, but it was like trying to put down any other weapon—once you became accustomed to it, you picked it up again, easy as breathing.

Samara, the woman waiting for him in the back, was a pleasant sort of woman, beefy and generous. A quick glance behind the ticket counter told him there were no magicians there either. Samara happily took his locusts, and more. Despite her colleague’s insistence that no other services were of value, her friend Samara had other ideas. Not even his wormy little tongue would dissuade her.

She seemed only mildly disappointed his cock wouldn’t cooperate, but did not ask why. He wondered how many others she had brought back here, and how many had been in any state to satisfy her with something other than a tongue or a hand.

She pushed his ticket at him when she was finished, and he gripped it closely and hurried away. Thrust it at the first platform manager he saw. She directed him to a waiting train. He stepped in, found a seat in the crowded third-class cabin, and wept for the first time since the end of the war. +

Ahmed stepped out of the train ten hours later and into a hot, chalky evening. He was hungry and light-headed, but full of hope that the interior cities he remembered would be significantly more welcoming than the border towns.

He had bunched up his ticket and jammed it in one of his slick’s pockets. Now he fished his ticket out, but the drugs and exhaustion meant he had trouble reading it. When the morphine had worn off on the train, he switched to siva, the military-issued version of sen, but it still left him muzzy-headed and aching. He doubted the vet he got it from was entirely honest about what it was. Siva had never left him feeling this disoriented.

A few passengers disembarked around him, and he finally mustered up the gall to ask one of the nearby women, “Excuse me, matron, what city is this?”

She looked startled. Then something like disgust tore at her face. It was a reaction he was becoming accustomed to. But it still cut at his heart. He had hoped the interior was different.

She kept moving as she said, “You’re in Amtullah, boy.”

It was never anything but that—boy. Not sir, not patron, not “What’s your name?” Just… boy. As if he had walked off his house mother’s stoop just yesterday.

Ahmed had never heard of Amtullah. That in itself wasn’t odd, he supposed. He grew up in the southeast, near the Drucian border. There weren’t a lot of people there, or proper schools. His first squad thought his accent was a laugh, and it had taken him two years to suppress it.

He gazed over the stir of women, toward the city proper. In the south, there were still some green things, so he expected the rest of the interior would be like that too, but no—even on the train, all he saw of the interior was dry and desiccated, just like the front. Yet, unlike the border towns, this city was intact. He saw elegant minarets in the distance rising from a cluster of domed public buildings and upscale tenement houses, all of it surrounded in a massive filter that blanketed the stir of the city like some kind of membrane. It was the most massive filter he’d ever seen, and he spent a long time working out how to deal with it. Outside, the boys and men who had come with him were headed toward customs, already arguing with the armed women who he assumed would carry the city’s only passkeys.

He found a call box inside the station and dialed the only civilian pattern he still remembered.

After the line stirred and chittered and spat for some time, a thin voice rose from the darkness and rasped, “Who is this?”

“Amtullah. Filter. You done one before?”

“Who is this?”

“You said to call if I ever came home.”

He heard something clatter on the other side of the line. “Been a long time, friend.”

“Have you done that filter or not?”

“Call this pattern. Oval. Square. Circle. Circle. Triangle. Hex. Got that?”

He repeated it.

“Good. She’ll hook you up.” There was some noise in the background. Ahmed wondered if the man had a proper family now, someone he had to hide Ahmed from. “Don’t call again.”

“I won’t.”

“Ahmed?”

“Yes?”

The man’s voice broke. “Everyone has his fate, but I asked God, the compassionate, the merciful, at each prayer for your safe return. May God preserve you.”

Ahmed hung up. Stared at the filter. His commanding officer had told him once that fear in the ranks was rampant, yes, but it was fear that kept people in line. “They need to fear me more than the enemy,” she told him. “That’s the secret to any great command.”

He had put a knife through her three years later. But even in that instant, he wasn’t sure who was more terrified—him or her. Worse, he wasn’t sure what any of that proved.

Ahmed had worked for a lot of smart, sadistic fucks. They had hidden the sadism behind military intelligence badges and security protocols, but their arrogance and lack of compassion were harder to tuck up under a prayer rug. They had taught him everything they knew, and he had used it ruthlessly, relentlessly. It had kept him alive, yes. But his reward for fifteen years of service and putting a knife in the eye of every good soldier he knew was this.

Six weeks ago, he’d known very little about the world outside the military. Now he knew enough to be certain that the man he was at the front no longer existed. Assholes lived a long time, but if that was living, he wanted none of it. It was time to let go of all the catshit, and learn how to be a man on his own terms, in a new world that had no idea what to do with him.

E
she wore somber colors to the wake, darkened by the warm rain. He stood well back from the gravesite, now clogged with mourners and pall bearers and swordsmen. The whole steaming, chanting, incenseheavy affair reminded him of just how stubbornly conservative many parts of Ras Tieg still were. All the rest of the people on Umayma had learned not to bury their bodies three millennia ago, back at the beginning of the world. They cut off their heads and burned them, no matter the prescriptions set down in any holy book. Those instructions were for people on some other world.

But Ras Tiegans on the frontier thought differently. Cutting up a body and burning it was still sacrilege, desecration. It had something to do with ashes and dust and prophets who didn’t stay dead, and how that was holy. Eshe didn’t really follow it. But it meant that this crowd waited for something far more dramatic than just seeing a man’s body covered over in dirt.

The priest’s grave was about as deep as Eshe’s arm was long. The body was covered in a white muslin shroud that trembled and shook. Beetles and midges skittered along its surface. The trembling and writhing beneath the shroud was likely still just the bugs, doing what bugs on Umayma did—devouring, destroying—transforming.

Three priests walked around the edges of the fresh grave garbed all in their silver-and-gilt finery. The robes, by now, were soggy and just a little transparent. Many Ras Tiegan priests had some talent with bugs, having been conscripted as soon as their talent emerged. They also tended to be lean, muscular fighters in their youth. So even after an hour walking around in the mud swinging pots of incense and flogging themselves with strings of holy beads while intoning the same monotonous prayer about resurrection, they were holding up pretty well. The little red dots drawn onto their foreheads with ink—the symbolic eye of god donned by this particular sect—had begun to tear and run, leaving crimson rivulets dripping into their faces like bloody tears. Only the very rich could afford this many priests for a wake. Most folks got an anonymous beheading by some underpaid graveyard swordsman. Eshe watched a man of just that sort trekking down the far side of the graveyard, long sword over one shoulder. A shimmering trail of bloody entrails sloughed off the sword as it bounced along.